Do we really need a remake of West Side Story? Having won 10 Oscars (a record for a musical), including best picture, Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’s 1961 screen incarnation of the 1957 Broadway musical hit remains a much-loved and much-watched “classic”; a self-consciously streetwise affair with weapons-grade earworm tunes and choreography that kids would try to mimic in school playgrounds for decades. Yet even the most ardent fan of the original would have to admit that time has not been kind to the sight of Natalie Wood playing a Latina. Hooray, then, for screen newcomer Rachel Zegler, who landed the lead role of Maria from an open casting call, and whose vibrantly natural performance almost singlehandedly justifies this “reimagining” from director Steven Spielberg.
The story, which transposes the star-crossed lovers of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet from Renaissance-era Verona to postwar New York, hardly needs rehearsing. Suffice to say that Spielberg’s version opens with what could be an outtake from the later stages of Saving Private Ryan – an aerial view of what looks like a bomb site, over which a wrecking ball ominously hangs. This is the stamping ground of the Jets, the white gang fighting a turf war with their sworn Puerto Rican enemies, the Sharks.
Ansel Elgort is Tony, a one-time troublemaker now attempting to put his past behind him. When Tony falls for Maria at a dance designed to bring harmony between warring clans (a “social experiment”), he incurs the wrath of friends and foes alike. With a once-and-for-all rumble on the cards, into which gang leader Riff (the sinewy Mike Faist) seems determined to drag his old friend, the scene is set for cross-cultural tragedy of love and death.
Shot in handsome widescreen vistas by Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg’s West Side Story starts with a strangely subdued palette that bursts into vibrant colour during skirt-swirling dancehall showdowns. Early scenes of the Jets staking out their turf call to mind the ragged street urchins from Lionel Bart’s Oliver!, another stage musical hit that became a 60s screen staple. Yet while Jon M Chu’s recent screen adaptation of In the Heights gave us wall-walking scenes that adventurously turned the world on its side, Spielberg and Kaminski lean into the simpler, low-angle, 45-degree tilts that have become common parlance in New York gang movies.
As for the set-piece songs, Elgort struggles to breathe much life into Maria, his voice tinged with a touch of the Tony Hadleys whenever he gets into his upper register. It’s a shortcoming laid bare when he duets with Zegler, the agility of her voice putting his to shame. Odd, too, that Elgort, a hoofer who literally danced his way through the opening credits of Baby Driver, seems somewhat flat-footed when compared to his springy Jet counterparts. Could this duck-lipped, baby-faced Tony really have been just one punch away from murder?
Where Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner’s version comes into its own is in the moments where it dares to find its own distinct voice – nowhere more so than in placing Somewhere in the hands of Rita Moreno. Having played Anita in the 1961 film, a role thrillingly filled here by Ariana DeBose, Moreno, who also gets an exec-producer credit, comes to embody the heart and soul of this new production. As Valentina, widowed owner of Doc’s Drugstore, Moreno provides the genetic link between the past and the present, lending a sense of gravitas to scenes that might otherwise have teetered into parody. For me, her low-key rendition ofthe song is up there with the opening track of Tom Waits’s 1978 album Blue Valentine, rich in fragile, heartbreaking pathos.
Other smart moves include casting the non-binary actor Iris Menas as Anybodys, a performance that has something of the oomph of Linda Manz’s brilliant turn in The Wanderers, repaying the inspirational debt that Philip Kaufman’s 1979 cult classic owed to the Wise/Robbins West Side Story, bringing everything full circle.
